Dave Lewis, Tony O'Donnell, Kevin Feeney, Aoife Brady

Person Centric Service Adaptation

Knowledge and Data Engineering Group
Department of Computer Science
Trinity College Dublin

Adaptive systems can be modelled as being constructed from Adaptive Service Elements that, individually and collectively, use resources to provide users with services and then adapt how those services are delivered based on changes in the system's context and available resources. People interact with such adaptive systems both as users of services and as those responsible for the allocation and use of the resources employed, e.g. network bandwidth, file access, device displays, server cycles etc. Person Centric Service Adaptation addresses how the needs of such users are interpreted and mapped onto the adaptive mechanisms of the adaptive system and its components. Adaptation must be conducted in a manner that is both natural to use and transparent to the user, while at the same time ensuring the user has a sense of control over the adaptive mechanisms.

In this paper we review how adaptive systems have largely focussed on how a user interacts with an adaptive system. We argue, however, that for adaptive systems to be deployed in ubiquitous computing environments we must address more natural interaction with the system, enabled by the wider range of multi-model devices available. We also argue that for wide-spread deployment of adaptive systems, stronger abstractions must be developed in the constraining of adaptive behaviour, especially when adaptive ubiquitous computing systems are used in organisations and collaborative activities. Initial work towards these goals is presented.